World Views

 The main premise of this post is that culture drives world view which in turn drives thought process. 

My fascination with the concept probably started when I discovered the research of Richard Nesbitt, who happens to be a member of the faculty at my alma mater (Go Blue!), and his book: The Geography of Thought: Why We Think the Way We Do. I'll just copy and paste a summary of the work taken from his UM website page:

The Geography of Thought shows that East Asia and the West have had different systems of thought, including perception, assumptions about the nature of the world, and thinking processes, for thousands of years. Ancient Greek philosophers were "analytic" — objects and people are separated from their environment, categorized, and reasoned about using logical rules. Psychological experiments show the same is true of ordinary Westerners today. Ancient Chinese philosophers and ordinary East Asians today share a "holistic" orientation — perceiving and thinking about objects in relation to their environments and reasoning dialectically, trying to find the Middle Way between opposing propositions. Differences in thought stem from differences in social practices, with the West being individualistic and the East collectivistic.

I found this work to be quite helpful in understanding the uneasy feeling that I've walked through life with one foot each in a different world because I've been brought up to interact in both cultures which have some mutually exclusive values and concepts; having to choose which value/concept prevails to make a decision has often resulted in feelings of I might best describe as disloyalty due to having to make some sort of value judgement as to which value/concept is most relevant to the situation. 

I will acknowledge that for the most part, a western world view tends to prevail in my thinking and I prefer to minimize the interaction I have with those who have a primarily holistic/community based world view. This is somewhat ironic, because my choice to leave the Midwest and move to southern California was driven by a desire to 'find my people', only to discover that my people are Asians who were raised in predominantly Caucasian environments. I've discovered that the term Asian-American is rather nebulous and it identifies your ethnic heritage - but not your cultural heritage. I met a family therapist whose clientele are exclusively Asian-American and his first observation was that I was unlike any other Asian-American male he'd ever met. Himself a Nisei, he once told me that after five minutes, he could identify where another Nisei from southern California was born and raised, with major categories including the (San Fernando) Valley, Little Tokyo (downtown inner city), Gardena (in the South Bay, etc.)  This led me to understand that there are many different Asian-American sub-cultures, including my own. The few Asian friends that I've made were not born and raised in any Asian enclave in southern California; they were all raised in predominantly Caucasian environments like I was. I suppose a point I'm getting to is that any Asian-American's experience might be similar to that of a number of other Asian-Americans - but it won't necessarily be prescriptive of anyone else's experience.

I have since discovered that there's at least one more major world view. I hesitate to describe for fear of coming off racist in some way, but since the western world view is generally attributed to Caucasians, and the community/holistic world view is associated with Asians, I will add a third category which seems to be characteristic of those whose ethnicities are tied but not necessarily limited to the continent of Africa. This world view embraces the idea that there are supernatural solutions for any given situation. Such cultures embrace things like voodoo, medicine men, etc. 

For those who subscribe to a Judeo-Christian world view, I will share observations on how the cultural world affects the emphasis of how they live out their faith:

- Those with a western world view tend to embrace scholarship - the study of the Scriptures;
- Those with collective/holistic world view tend to embrace fellowship most readily;
- Those with the third world view tend to focus God's supernatural powers;

Furthermore, if you subscribe to the story of the Tower of Babel being an actual historical event, these differences are a result of the Tower of Babel. It seems to me that this idea begs to be explored in depth.